Again and again over the week-long News & Observer series on the disgraceful state of mental health care in North Carolina, the question kept coming back: How can any state tolerate this? The series exposed horrid physical abuses of patients and even the deaths of some.

And then there were the caregivers, using that term loosely, who took advantage of a type of service called "community support," in which workers with high school diplomas were assigned to assist the mentally ill in day-to-day chores. The companies could be paid up to $61 an hour when an employee accompanied someone to the grocery store, for example. One company actually recruited clients by going door-to-door. That company billed millions of dollars over several years, most of it paid by the government through Medicaid. The N&O estimated that waste in that program amounted to at least $400 million.

Yes, the reform movement, a privatization of sorts of the mental health system that was launched by the General Assembly in 2001, went on to become a shambles, a miserable failure. The victims of that failure have been the many thousands of North Carolinians suffering from mental illness. Governor Easley maintains that he opposed the legislature's reform push at the time, and that he thought the effort had died. But once it went through, he obviously was responsible for carrying it out.

An idea central to reform was that rather than counties providing services directly to people who couldn't otherwise afford it, the responsibility would be doled out to the private sector and paid for with public funds. The logic went that most people would be better off being treated with programs in their communities, close to them, convenient for them, rather than being institutionalized. Plans were, and are, to close Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh, for example, and consolidate services in a new hospital in Butner, north of Durham.

At a press conference Tuesday, Easley stood with former Raleigh City Manager Dempsey Benton, now secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services and the man the governor says he has charged with fixing the mental health care system. Easley said the system now amounts to "privatization without accountability," and that in effect no one has been in charge.

As chief executive, the governor should have assumed much more responsibility for keeping reform on track, or blowing the whistle if he thought the process was failing to work as intended. Now, he seeks more authority for his administrators -- for example, to ride herd on payments to private companies. It's not clear that authority hasn't existed all along, but it's a subject the legislature should address and clarify. Easley also is right to favor mandatory reporting of deaths in mental health facilities, a glaring omission exposed by The N&O's series.

The legislature created this mess, and the Easley administration didn't watch the changes closely enough. Now, everyone will be watching -- to see if the governor and lawmakers will keep the promises implicit in "reform."